Rikki Simons' Lil' Rhumbaghost

You can now read the first six chapters of my book, Hitherto a Lion on GoodReads. Just click the READ BOOK button here: Hitherto a Lion.

Afterwards, if you find yourself wanting to know how it all ends, you can buy it for $2.99 on either the Nook or the Kindle. Yay!

-Rikki

Since I’m getting closer to the release, it’s time I gave you another chapter.  Please enjoy chapter five of my novel, Hitherto a Lion, available end of this July on Nook, Kindle, iBookstore, and Paperback.

(Read the Fourth Chapter)

(Read the Third Chapter)

(Read the Second Chapter)

(Read the First Chapter)

Chapter Five

The Epiphany

Enslaving the Ascended Humans’ TEA Cell brains with the Will of Æsirisæ had not been pleasant, but the lion didn’t understand, and the young man pretended to not care.  Fel could feel Mún Rafæl below his dream cloud somewhere; not corporeal, he seemed to exist only as a mist, a bemused and belligerent spirit seeking to betray its ephemeral nature.  He raged alone, furious that his own race mistrusted him.

Fel watched as the phantom young man oversaw the enslavement of the six living Ascended Humans.  The Gylfinîr Engineer went first, lying her body down in one of the Mare Hypatia’s warmly lit medical crèches.  It was a hollow tube in a row of four identical tubes set into the curved wall of the white and ocher room.  The others were near.  The two women still kept a protective circle of their charge, while the three men hung back, sitting at a long blue table with expressions of either suffused anger or frustration.  Of the men, only the Librarian’s face was visible with worry.

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I’m back from Florida SuperCon, so here now, once again, it’s time for another preview.  Please enjoy chapter four of my novel, Hitherto a Lion, available end of this July on Nook, Kindle, and Paperback.

(Read the Third Chapter)

(Read the Second Chapter)

(Read the First Chapter)

Chapter Four

The Extraction of Madness

On his plateau of elephant dream clouds, Fel watched as his body was tucked into the blackout box in the Mare Hypatia’s cargo hold.  His mind reached out from there, his robotic ticks allowing him to interface with the ship’s various sensors.  He saw the blue and white ship, shaped like a cattail plant with too many bumps, slide with silent drama from the rupturing spaceport, saw the ship’s guns turn on the great rotting bicycle wheel and strip its skin from its rim.

The ship, with its curvilinear form, felt female to him, and he was aware now of the other presence in his space, of the young man looking over his shoulder.  The young man agreed the ship was female, though he didn’t say a word.

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It’s time for another chapter.  Please enjoy this free preview of the third chapter of my novel, Hitherto a Lion, available in July on Nook, Kindle, and Paperback.

(Read the Second Chapter)

(Read the First Chapter)

Chapter Three

The Conjurer

The young man whispered in Fel’s ear, “Helpless and tired, you lay your head down weeping and smile yourself to sleep.”

And Fel did sleep.

The colony’s artificial daylight filtered though the filigree blur of his closing eyelashes.  From the rolling dreams of cloud elephants and leopard hunts, Fel drifted in and out of blackness.  Once, he opened his eyes and saw the woman and the man standing over him, speaking at length.  The colony’s lighting systems were stuck at dawn, and so the two Humans continued to stand there under the blue-black faux morning, the young man glowing like a Hindu messenger under the sapphire phosphorescence, the woman absorbing all light like Pan’s shadow.  He saw that she had recovered a metal staff and a scabbarded short sword from the wreckage of the battleground.  She stood with the staff in both her hands and the sword fastened to her side.  Staff of Æthax and Sword of Évir, glowed the words only seen in AR.  “Who are you?” he heard the woman say.

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Hello again.  And here we are again.  Please enjoy this free preview of the second chapter of my novel, Hitherto a Lion, available in July on Nook, Kindle, and Paperback.

(Or Read Chapter One First)

Chapter Two

Behold the Man

Hæl was a triple star system.

For every sixty-nine thousand years that burned through the heavens, the cold brown dwarf called Bram and its companion orange dwarf star, Étienne, would complete an orbit around the central blue giant star, Hæl Damiano.  Bram was the sixth and final substellar object in the system, a failed star eighty times the mass of Jupiter.  As an engorged brown dwarf just teetering on the edge of stellar ignition, its upper atmosphere swirled with ammonia clouds barely hotter than a wood fire oven.  Like a black comet suffused in a radiant fleece of planet-sized lightning storms instead of elementary ice, it cut through the star system utterly perpendicular to the plane of the ecliptic and carried a lantern to light its way in the form of Étienne, the bloated orange star — and within the long span of its highly elliptical orbit, the blind aeons sat rapt as it slowly stalked its celestial prey.  Bram was a planet killer.  This was the information that flowed into an isolated part of Fel’s sleeping brain.

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Please enjoy this free preview of the first chapter of my novel, Hitherto a Lion, available in July on Nook, Kindle, and Paperback.

-Rikki

Chapter One

This Will Never End

Fel forgot that his name was short for Rafæl, the name of an angel, but Fel was a black lion and he lived under the stars in the Long Savanna.  He had never seen an angel.

Fel was alive when the Bœzch Generals ruptured the ground of the Savanna, though his memory of the event was only a din of erupting colors of fire-red and screams-of-blue.  When the Humans were dragged from their labyrinthine cities on the edge of the grass and abused in ways beyond the Euclidian, twisted towards shapes only dreamed in languid Dali premonitions, the pride kept their distance, and Fel’s brothers and sisters were satisfied that the wildebeest and zebra were unharmed.  The pride was well.  The Bœzch things directed their wrath solely towards Humanity.

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